Unique townhouses an exception to the rules

Design review helps prevent mediocrity

AUBREY COHE, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

By AUBREY COHEN, P-I REPORTER

Published 10:00 pm, Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Erna Kooistra, visiting from Iowa, walks Monday with great-grandson Jonah Hieb past the Secret Garden townhouses on 11th Avenue East in Capitol Hill. The development got permission to deviate from 11 Seattle rules, including the amount of private open space and building lot coverage, depth and setbacks from property lines. The deviations allowed for a large, shared courtyard in the middle of the complex.
Photo: Andy Rogers/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

All of Seattle architect Brandon Nicholson's favorite townhouses locally have something in common.

They deviate from Seattle's current development rules and its proposed new rules -- both aimed at making townhouses look and function better.

"This one is superb, but it violates so many of the basic code principles," Nicholson said last week, standing in front of the Secret Garden development in Capitol Hill.

The homes are too close to the property lines; most open space is in one central courtyard; some of the parking is too close to an alley; and a second driveway would not normally be allowed to exist.

The project's developer, Marty Liebowitz, is unusual, too -- he called for a moratorium earlier this month on new projects while city officials overhauled the rules.

Secret Garden and other projects got away with being different by going through design review, which gives planners, or a design board, authority to approve specific deviations from code after looking over developers' proposals. Secret Garden got approval for deviation from 11 standards.

Architects, developers, city officials and neighborhood residents all seem to agree that townhouses built to meet the code, without design review, are largely formulaic, mediocre looking and disconnected from the streets on which they're plopped down.

The city's latest proposal includes allowing homes closer to the street (with stoops and steps even closer), raising height limits for nonpitched roofs and allowing driveways onto a property from both streets and alleys (current rules do not allow street driveways for properties along alleys).

All of these would make it easier to vary designs from the current popular template of faux-Craftsman homes grouped tightly around an auto court, and create more central, shared open space, rather than the individual yards now required.

"My guess is the residents would much rather have that kind of light and open courtyard," Nicholson said last week, while standing in front of Secret Garden.

But, even with the changes, existing projects that went through design review still would need to use that process, because they would run afoul of such rules as setback requirements, limits on the width and depth of townhouses and the amount of lot they could cover.

The new plan would waive the width, depth and lot coverage limits, but only for lots smaller than 9,000 square feet. It also would limit the total floor area of townhouses to one to two times the lot size, depending on the zone.

For most other developments, city codes have moved entirely to such floor-area limits, which control the total amount of building space, while allowing more design flexibility.

Beyond allowing more flexibility, the plan would impose new mandates, such as wider driveways, front entrances to all street-facing townhouses, and windows and doors on at least 20 percent of facades. It also would cap the height of any street-facing fences at 4 feet.

At a forum on townhouses earlier this month, community activist Greg Hill, of the Wallingford Community Council, fretted that proposed changes would allow bigger, boxier buildings closer to neighbors.

The current regulations were supposed to ensure that townhouses fit in with Seattle's single-family character, Hill noted. "At the time, we really thought townhouses were going to be great."

The challenge is to free townhouses from the current box of mediocrity without granting irresponsible developers license to inflict new horrors on neighborhoods, said City Councilwoman Sally Clark, who is chairwoman of the council's planning, land use and neighborhoods committee and organized the forum.

"What it ultimately comes down to is, how do I protect against the bad people," she asked Tuesday. "It's not very good for the soul to build policy around, 'What's the worst people could do with this?' "

Developer Dan Duffus argued that it was impossible to ensure decent design.

"There are always going to be bad townhouses," he said at the forum.

For some, including Nicholson and Liebowitz, the answer is requiring all projects to go through design review. Duffus said design review is too costly, in terms of time and money, for small townhouse projects.

Design review can pay off by approving changes that allow more total homes on a site, because standard requirements nearly always mean developers can't fit the number of units that zoning allows, Nicholson said. Several local projects added units by burying parking underground and then putting homes on top of the parking and the garage entrance.

Clark said she wants to find a level of design review that ensures good projects while not unduly burdening small projects.

"I do think there's a balance in there," she said.

City officials are considering requiring more projects to go through some type of design review, Planning and Development Director Diane Sugimura said. "It's something we're looking at. Right now we have more projects than the (design review) boards can handle."

A Queen Anne development with a line of brick row houses along the south side of West Comstock Street is one of Seattle's best attempts at creating the kind of urban living that dominates East Coast downtowns, Nicholson said.

But it was only possible because it was all one project. Seattle's code allows townhouses within one project to run up against each other, but has no provisions for putting them wall-to-wall with homes on neighboring sites.

Change that, and a site that now has two houses behind two others, with a parking court between them, could have four homes in a row, each with a long, narrow yard and parking at the back, along an alley, if there is one, Nicholson said. Such homes would be more attractive and work better for families, he said.

But row houses would not make it through design review and have gotten nowhere in the code update because many of the neighborhoods zoned for townhouses still have many single-family homes whose owners won't embrace allowing new homes right on their property lines, Nicholson said.

Mike Podowski, a city planner working on the proposed new rules, said row houses work best when cities are designed that way in the first place.

"We've been handed a different context," he said.

Clark suggested the city allow some row houses as a demonstration of how they could work.

"To come in with something that is that different for Seattle, I think you have to prove to neighborhoods that it can be done gracefully in a way that really works for the neighborhood," she said.

Row houses make so much sense that they're basically inevitable, Nicholson predicted. "There are rough years in the transition from one to the other, but it's going to happen."